Katsushika Hokusai

Hokusai claimed he would not produce anything worth keeping until he was seventy three, and given that The Great Wave came out when he was around seventy, he may have meant it. He worked under more than thirty names across a career of seventy years.

Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published in the early 1830s, is the series that travelled. The Great Wave off Kanagawa, with Fuji tiny beneath the curling water and boats caught in the trough, became one of the most reproduced images on earth. Prussian blue, newly available from Europe, made it possible.

He also produced the Manga, fifteen volumes of sketches covering everything from wrestlers to ghosts to construction techniques. When the prints reached France in the 1860s they reshaped European art. Degas, Monet, Van Gogh and Whistler all took something from them.